Free Shark Trouble by Peter Benchley Page A

of his vision. Here’s what he recalls:
    â€œI didn’t give it a thought, didn’t pay any mind to what kind it was. Before my eyes had refocused on the bottom, it hit me. Out of nowhere. I never saw it coming. All I knew was, I felt like I’d been hit by a freight train. My mask was knocked off, both flippers came off, I dropped the spear, and suddenly the water was full of blood. Mine. The mako had hit me just once, a glancing blow, tore up my thigh pretty badly. I could see him off a ways, hanging there, like he was deciding whether or not I was worth eating. Then—
poof!
—he was gone. I guess he figured I was too bony.”
    Bony, perhaps; lucky, definitely.
    Any
Shark Can Ruin Your Day
    Don’t take as gospel my (or anybody’s) list of bad actors in the company of sharks. All such lists are subjective. Mine includes only sharks that either I or my colleagues have had trouble with. Some folks, for instance, have reason to be scared of hammerheads; others have had unhappy run-ins with gray reef sharks.
    What you
should
take as gospel—and what subjective lists ignore—is the most important fundamental precept of dealing with sharks, that is,
any
shark
can
be dangerous. Still, most injuries inflicted by reputedly inoffensive sharks are caused by human error or ignorance.
    Nurse sharks, for example, are among the most docile of all species. The common peril people face from them is being bumped by them as they flee. I know of at least one diver, however, who, when he entered a cave and saw a nurse shark sleeping in the sand, pulled the shark’s tail to get it to move. The shark moved, all right; startled awake, it spun around in a frantic blur, bit the man in the throat (missing an artery by a couple of millimeters), tore a gold chain from his neck, and, as it fled the cave, knocked the man spinning against the rock wall.
    Over a single August weekend in 2001, in the single Florida county of Volusia, six people were bitten by sharks
that they saw before they entered the water
. The sharks (most were blacktips) had gathered to feed on schools of baitfish; the people had gathered to participate in a surfing contest. Too impatient to wait for the sharks to finish feeding and leave the area, the surfers chose instead to wade among and step over the feeding sharks.
    That only six were bitten seems to me a miracle.
    Other attacks last year happened to people who ignored, or were ignorant of, one or more of the basic rules that help keep the chances of an attack to a minimum: they swam at dawn or at dusk; they swam alone; they swam far from shore or where fish were feeding or birds were working.
    Elsewhere in the world, a man was almost killed when he tried to hitch a ride on the back of a whale shark, as harmless a giant as ever roamed the sea. When he grabbed the enormous dorsal fin, his hand slipped, then
he
slipped, and hung in the water, watching, as the great speckled body moved beneath him like a ship. Mesmerized, he forgot that this ship was driven not by a propeller but by a tail as tall as he was and as hard as iron, and the sweeping tail clubbed him from behind, rendering him breathless and senseless. He survived only because an alert buddy located his regulator mouthpiece, rammed it into his mouth and purged it—forcing air into him—and inflated his vest, which lifted him to the surface.
    There is one circumstance under which all sharks of all sizes and (nearly) all dietary predilections will eat a human being without hesitation. That is if the person is dead.
    Sharks are scavengers. Scouring and clearing the ocean of animals that are weak, weary, or dead is one of a shark’s most valuable functions.

8
    Swimming Safely in the Sea
    Â 
    At approximately nine o’clock on the morning of July 23, 2001, four young cousins—three girls and a boy, aged eleven to sixteen—waded into knee-deep water at a beach in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York.
    Although